TUSCALOOSA | Ever since U.S. Rep. Artur Davis lost his historic bid to become Alabama’s first African-American governor, there have been many chin-pulling, thumb-sucking, head-wagging analyses from experts across the nation trying to explain how he couldn’t even survive a Democratic primary in which many, if not most of the voters were black.

About the dumbest I saw came in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s voting in The Politico, an on-line journal with some very good writers and political analysts, none of whom were assigned to this particular story, where had they been paying attention they could have seen Sparks’ landslide victory coming from a mile away.

The story’s premise was that President Barack Obama (he’s black, too, you know) had very short coattails (in an election in which he wasn’t even running?) and that Davis, who chaired his campaign in Alabama in 2008 was just the latest black Democrat to bite the dust because… Well, I don’t know what the point they were trying to make was. There were, of course, a lot of “Well, it’s Alabama, what’da expect” articles. When it come to race that kind of analysis is, unfortunately, often justified, but not this time. Let’s make this very clear once and for all: Artur Davis lost because many, if not most, African-Americans voted against him.

And I can prove it.

Artur Davis

Here in Tuscaloosa we have two voting boxes in which practically every voter is black and votes Democratic. Obama beat McCain something like 2,000-to-4 in those boxes combined two years ago. The boxes are at Stillman College and the McDonald Hughes Center and in Tuesday’s voting a total of 864 voters showed up at the two polling stations.

Sparks claimed 511 votes in the two boxes, Davis 341. In other words Sparks got 59.97 of the votes cast in the Democratic primary in two virtually all black boxes. I don’t know how you could conclude anything other than Davis lost the African American vote, period, case closed. Here are some thoughts about why that was.

And for those keeping score, a dozen Republicans did show up to vote in their own gubernatorial primary at Stillman and McDonald Hughes, nine of them casting votes for favorite son Rep. Robert Bentley, who may be headed for a July 13 runoff on the GOP side, something nobody — or at least this body — saw coming from any distance…